The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence

me.
    “He gave it to me to bring you, Hagar. It wasn’t much of a gift, for Matt’s as tight with his money as he ever was. It was that plaid shawl that Dan couldn’t be parted from when he was knee-high to a grasshopper. The Lord knows where Matt had dug it up from, or whatuse he thought you’d have for it. But he came to me not an hour afterward and took it back. Said he’d decided he didn’t want to send it after all. Just as well.”
    It was the night before my wedding, and I was staying at Charlotte Tappen’s house. I wanted to go and talk with Matt, but I was not sure enough. He’d intended to send it as a reproach, a mockery, then found he cared something about me after all—that was my first thought. Then it struck me—what if he’d actually meant the gift to convey some gentleness, but changed his mind? If that was the case, I’d not have walked across the road to speak with him. I decided to wait and see if he’d turn up the following day, to give me away in place of Father. But, of course, he did not.
    What did I care? For the moment I was unencumbered. Charlotte’s mother gave a small reception, and I shimmered and flitted around like a newborn gnat, free, yet certain also that Father would soften and yield, when he saw how Brampton Shipley prospered, gentled, learned cravats and grammar.
    It was spring that day, a different spring from this one. The poplar bluffs had budded with sticky leaves, and the frogs had come back to the sloughs and sang like choruses of angels with sore throats, and the marsh marigolds were opening like shavings of sun on the brown river where the tadpoles danced and the bloodsuckers lay slimy and low, waiting for the boys’ feet. And I rode in the black-topped buggy beside the man who was now my mate.
    The Shipley house was square and frame, two-storied, the furniture shoddy and second-hand, the kitchen reeking and stale, for no one had scoured there properly since Clara died. Yet, seeing it, I wasn’t troubledin the slightest, still thinking of myself as chatelaine. I wonder who I imagined would do the work? I thought of Polacks and Galicians from the mountain, half-breeds from the river valley of the Wachakwa, or the daughters and spinster aunts of the poor, forgetting that Bram’s own daughters had hired out whenever they could be spared, until they married very young and gained a permanent employment.
    All the things in the musty, whey-smelling house were to be mine, such as they were, but when we entered, Bram handed me a cut-glass decanter with a silver top.
    “This here’s for you, Hagar.”
    I took it so casually, and laid it aside, and thought no more about it. He picked it up in his hands and turned it around. For a moment I thought he meant to break it, and for the life of me I couldn’t see why. Then he laughed and set it down and came close to me.
    “Let’s see what you look like under all that rig-out, Hagar.”
    I looked at him not so much in fear as in an iron incomprehension.
    “Downstairs—” he said. “Is that what bothers you? Or daylight? Don’t fret—there’s no one around for five miles.”
    “It seems to me that Lottie Drieser was right about you,” I said, “although I certainly hate to say it.”
    “What did they say of me?” Bram asked.
They—
knowing more than one had spoken.
    I only shrugged and would not say, for I had manners.
    “Never mind that now,” he said. “I don’t give a good goddamn. Hagar—you’re my wife.”
    It hurt and hurt, and afterward he stroked my forehead with his hand.
    “Didn’t you know that’s what’s done?”
    I said not a word, because I had not known, and when he’d bent, enormous and giant, I could not believe there could be within me a room to house such magnitude. When I found there was, I felt as one might feel discovering a second head, an unsuspected area. Pleasure or pain were one to me, meaningless. I only thought—well, thank the Lord now I know, and at least it’s possible,